Rant. was Re: [cvsnt] Re: WSAD 5.0.1 and CVSNT 2.0.35

Tony Hoyle tmh at nodomain.org
Tue Apr 27 04:38:34 BST 2004


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I'm sat here at 3.45am having done a full days' work, got home then done
CVSNT work until now (with a break for some food).

I do this for nothing, and, by and large, enjoy it.  I also get the support
of some dedicated people who point out (and sometimes fix) bugs, and
generally keep my priorities straight.

However I'm continually expected these days to do free techincal support not
only for CVSNT but for WSAD.  A program produced by the largest computer
company in the world (IBM) which costs an arm and a leg and seemingly is
utterly unsupported.  

It took me 6 months to get an answer out of them (a year or two ago now)
about whether they even were prepared to offer any feedback to me.  They
said no, and that should have been the end of the matter.  But no, they're
not even supporting their own paying customers.  

I'm sick and tired of answering the same damned questions over and over
again trying to do free techincal support for a commercial product.  If IBM
won't get off their fat arses and support their own software then I suggest
you stop buying from them in the future.  

Do date I have not received a *single* bug report forwarded to me from the
WSAD development team.   Around build 57d (2 years ago now) there used to
be some leakage of repository prefix informaton.  What was their
response... file a bug report?  Tell me about the problem?  No... post a
FAQ which effectively says 'CVSNT sucks.  Use Unix'.  This is the attitude
of 12 year olds not proffesional programmers.  2 years later they are
*still* insisting there are problems even though those problems haven't
existed since around that time.

Their latest little game has been to check the version of the server and
deliberately fail if CVSNT is installed.  Words fail at the utter
unprofessionalism and sheer childishness of this action.  It really puts an
organisation like IBM to shame that they would stoop to such actions.

I put in a workaround for that by lying to the client, but *why the hell
should I have to*.  *no* other client has these issues.  Where things have
broken from time to time their developers have filed bug reports and I've
fixed them usually within a day or two (pushok and smartcvs spring to mind,
and of course I get regular updates from tortoise and wincvs developers. 
ViewCVS took some work but with give&take on both sides it's worked out
OK).

However, I don't believe that the end user should suffer so I'm prepared to
work something out.

Currently the state of play is:

1. There seems to be no technical reason why a CVSNT server with a
repository prefix + the fake unix option won't work with WSAD.  The output
is nearly indistinguishable from a 'real' cvshome.org 1.11 server with this
setup (running sanity.sh against it should work reasonably well & is worth
trying at some point).
2. I have *no idea* what WSAD is expecting as output, and what it's parsing. 
I do know it's treating user specific output as authoritative.  Fine, but
without any idea of what output is significant is *will* break.  Ideally it
should be rewritten to use the data from the client/server protocol
correctly (however I'm not unreasonable and there may be technical reasons
why this can't be done easily).
3. Given (1), rename will almost certainly break WSAD.  I see no way to
avoid this.
4. There is still no point of contact with the WSAD developers.  This means
I get no feedback, and there's no dialogue.  Some things (like the case
sensitive pathname comparison problem) could have been sorted out one way
or the other long before release.

For the time being I will *not* be answering any more WSAD related support
queries.  If you want WSAD support your first port of call should be IBM,
since you've paid for that support.  .

If this is to change someone both (a) running the latest version of CVSNT,
and (b) running the latest version of WSAD.  Preferably in lots of
different combinations (with/without prefixes, etc.) and filing bugs with
enough detail that I can look at it.  Ideally this would be a WSAD
developer, but given their past support record I doubt this is going to
happen.

The above person should be prepared to spend time answering WSAD related
support questions (possibly summarising things on the wiki).  If necessary
I'm prepared start a support.wsad list to help this.

Tony




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